As elsewhere, in the field of medical engineering, the current trend in the resolution of problems related to information technology favors the use of centralized processes, in particular cloud computing. In such cases, complex processes, applications and also hardware and application-specific services are provided at a central point on specialized computers which clients connected thereto are able to access. Hence, the main computing effort and demands on resources occur centrally on the server and hence the connected clients can be embodied very thinly and simply (as so-called “thin clients”).
Also known is the use of remote computers or clients to display screen content. In such cases, for example, an application for calculating technical drawings (for example in the field of architecture) with corresponding plans or image data runs on the server and the drawings to be displayed are displayed on a remote client. This, for example, offers the advantage that the applications can be adapted more flexibly to the respective use case. The user (for example the architect) can then access the image data and view them from mobile devices (for example including from remote workstations or even from the user's Smartphone at the building site). Solutions of this kind are also known as remote-desktop solutions and are commercially available, for example, from the company Microsoft (for example Remote Desktop/RemoteFX). Other products are, for example, VMWARE View, Citrix Receiver.
However, the field of medical engineering has the problem that the aforementioned remote-desktop products cannot be used since there are special regulations and requirements relating to the evaluation of medical image data sets. For example, in the context of image-supported diagnostics there is a requirement to ensure that, in the case of a sequence of image data, in principle all image data sets in the sequence of images are displayed on the monitor. In other words, it must be possible to ensure that a sequence of images is always displayed completely on a remote monitor. This is not possible with the remote-desktop systems known hitherto from the prior art. It is not possible to provide an additional control of the display of the screen content on the remote computer.
In this context, it has been found to be problematic that it is not always possible to provide sufficient bandwidth for the connection between the server and the connected remote clients. If, therefore, it is only possible to provide a connection with low bandwidth by way of example (for example due to a poor mobile radio connection), as a rule, remote-desktop systems work on the basis of only transferring part of the data packets to the client. For medical engineering applications, this means that not all images in an image sequence are displayed on the remote display device but, for example, “interim images” to be displayed for a short period only are left out of the display to optimize the data transmission. However, with the systems available hitherto according to the prior art, the client is not able to monitor whether all images in a sequence of images have been displayed. This is not possible, since so-to-speak the “benchmark” is missing on the client and hence the client regularly does not have data and information at its disposal in order to perform this monitoring. This also results in an inability to control the quality and completeness of the images displayed on the remote client. In practice, the result of this is that previous systems and products from the prior art cannot be used for clinical evaluations on a remote-client basis.